Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Live reporting: Finance Committee - Jan 8, 2013

Present: Smith, Goldsmith, Dufur, Quinn, Roche, Dewsnap, Feldman, Aparo, Huempfner
Absent: none

Happy New Year!

Jeff Nutting provides some background on the capital budget process and the phased approach is being put together for this year. DPW will present tonight on their capital needs. Other departments will come forward in future meetings.

Items 2, 3 8, 110

Brutus Cantoreggi, DPW Director
Carlos Rebelo, Laurie Ruszala, Deacon Perrota
1 - $500,000 for roads for crack sealing and overlays, attempting to more preventive maintenance

Jeff mentioned completion of the town wide survey on the road condition, to fix it all would be $48M
a rating and cost estimate for every street is available

cheaper to chip seal than to overlay than to complete rebuild
do more earlier and that helps avoid the major expenses

Reducing size of road to make it easier to both reduce the storm water runoff as well as provide less maintenance requirements going forward

Some roads don't make sense to narrow it but where it does make sense, let's do it. Also helps to slow traffic down, people tend to drive slower on a narrow road

2 - vehicles
currently past life expectancy, we do buy used equipment but in this case it is used so heavily we use it so much we really need a new one. A key piece of equipment, a priority

$7500 - update and fix an older Ford truck
 - engineering staff vehicle, gotten away from re-using older police vehicles, moved to some smaller vehicles. Available for short money and provide good mileage

a trailer to move some equipment around, some funds out of highway, water and sewer for replacement of this trailer

based upon a case by case basis for each piece of equipment
saved $100,000 with a used 10-wheeler, that we should get a good number of years from
we have good mechanics and the folks respect the equipment, we do take care of them
they don't look too bad but they are just old


Water Dept
following water master plan, did East, West, etc. streets downtown this year
doing Lincoln from Brook to Daniels next year
will adjust schedule to make roads and water needs
water mains one year, street the next
Pine Circle and Highland Road done by DPW this year
other streets need to be contracted out
asbestos pipes need to be replaced as they tend to be leaky (otherwise safe)

get water line issue resolved and street paved at same time
the water rate has grown due to some of the capital work but the cost is also driven by the amount of water sold and with the efficiency and reductions in place, we are actually selling less water.

is there a way to get it done cheaper? if so, then we'll do it inhouse

Sewer Dept
muffin monster grinder to be installed at our Milliken Station
debrie clogs up the pumps to shut them down, these devices would allow the debrie to get chopped up and broken down so they won't clog the pumps
Swifters have overwhelmed the sewers, why? they can?
would reduce the maintenance from once a week to once a month

revenues really low, trying to avoid a rate increase which is already scheduled for 20% again later this year due to the Charles River plant cost

note to community on the switfers - to not through them into the sewer systems
it is not too swift to through a swifter in the sewer

$1.573,000 as total for capital plan this phase
motion to approve capital plan, seconded and approved unanimously

Water fund capital for $1,036,000
motion to approve capital plan, seconded and approved unanimously

Sewer capital for $163,000
motion to approve capital plan, seconded and approved unanimously


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